


No Hard Feelings

by goodoldfashioned



Category: RedLetterMedia RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Current Events, Fights, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:15:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27141649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodoldfashioned/pseuds/goodoldfashioned
Summary: In 2002, Mike and Jay have a terrible fight. Mike goes to Rich to inform him that he's leaving town forever. Rich does some emergency magic.
Relationships: Mike/Jay
Comments: 17
Kudos: 43





	No Hard Feelings

**Author's Note:**

> This is the other young Mike meets older Jay time travel fic I started to write before the Sid/Dex one, both inspired by Jo's amazing art <3 <3
> 
> This is an alternate universe where Rich has magical powers, what more can I say. 
> 
> *

_Chicago suburbs, 2002_

Rich was minding his own business playing Grand Theft Auto when a home invader slammed in through his front door and stomped into the house like he owned the place.

It was Mike, of course. He was glowering and carrying a duffel bag, looking like he wanted to kill someone and also like he was trying not to cry.

Rich sighed and paused his game.

“I’m just here to tell you I’m leaving town and never coming back,” Mike said. His voice was rough from a combination of some kind of emotion and an attempt to seem scary, like he was threatening Rich with this information. “So. Goodbye forever.”

“Okayyy,” Rich said slowly, scratching his head. “What?”

“I’m done with Jay, too,” Mike said. He did a sort of pained growl thing and threw his duffel bag down against the floor like he was trying to put a dent in the house’s foundation. “That evil little shit can go to hell. I’m _never_ going back to Milwaukee and I can’t even live _here_ anymore, because it’s too close to _him_.” 

“Ah,” Rich said, beginning to understand. He looked longingly back at his video game and accepted that he wouldn’t be able to return to playing for a while. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked when Mike just paced around the living room breathing heavily and looking like he was barely restraining himself from stomping all of Rich’s belongings into pieces. 

“No,” Mike said. “I don’t want to-- It doesn’t matter. Ask him. Ha! I’d _love_ to hear how he’d characterize it.” 

“It?”

“Rich, I’m just here to tell you I’m leaving. Do you hear me? I’m serious. I’m going right now.”

“Going-- Where?”

“Key West,” Mike said, and he snarled when Rich laughed. “What? Why shouldn’t I go there? I’ll work on a fishing boat or something. I’ll bartend. I don’t care. I just can’t be here anymore. I’m done with making movies, done with Jay, done with all of it. Fuck!”

He turned and kicked Rich’s couch.

“Hey!” Rich said. 

“Sorry.” 

Mike’s shoulders slumped. He had his back to Rich. He sniffled once, and when he turned his eyes were a little pink at the corners but also hard and angry, like he really was serious. Rich had seen Mike be determined about crazy shit before. He didn’t tend to back down easily. 

“Fine, Mike,” Rich said. He put his controller down and stood from the nest of pillows he’d been sitting in. He’d foolishly assumed this would be a relaxing Saturday off of work. Apparently, instead, it was actually the day he’d have to activate one of his powers. 

“You don’t believe me,” Mike said. “You think I’m just having a tantrum. Well, I’m not, Rich. I’m serious this time, I’m--”

“No, I know you are. Just do one thing for me before you go, okay?”

Mike looked immediately suspicious, but also like he’d probably humor Rich’s request. They had been friends for almost ten years, after all. 

“What?” Mike asked. 

“Have a beer with me!”

Mike’s suspicious look increased tenfold. He even took a step backward. 

“What?” Mike said. “You don’t drink.” 

“There’s a first time for everything, and what better occasion to have my first beer than your last day in town? C’mon, I’ve got a few special ones at the back of the fridge.”

“Special-- What?” Mike closed his eyes and shook his head before again looking at Rich like he’d lost his mind. “You have beer here? Why?”

“For a special fucking occasion, did you not just hear me? C’mon, if you can blow in here and announce that you’re leaving forever without telling me why, I can ask you to have a beer with me, right? Stranger things have happened.” 

“You’re being weird.”

“Um, so are you? Mike, just humor me. You’re going away forever? Okay, fucker, whatever you say. But you’re my best friend. You owe me this.” 

Mike stared at Rich with scrutiny for a few seconds, then sighed and nodded. He looked profoundly sad. Rich knew there were a couple of ways he could let this play out and that none of them would exactly end in disaster. He’d lived through several timelines where this had more or less happened already. 

Now seemed like as good a time as any to finally try using this particular power, which lived in the beer bottle that he was about to watch Mike drink.

“Wow,” Mike said when Rich pulled out the two beer bottles from the back of the fridge. They were both on the big side for single servings, and old-fashioned with swing top seals. “Those look, uh. Intense.” 

“They are! I think.” Rich set one on the cluttered kitchen counter, in reach of Mike, then popped the cap on the one he was going to pretend to drink from himself. “To ten years of friendship,” he said, a little bitterly, when he lifted the bottle in Mike’s direction. 

“Rich--”

“No, no, you’re right. Jay is too evil. Too powerful. You’d better run while you can.”

Mike rolled his eyes, flushed, and grabbed the other beer. 

“You don’t understand,” he muttered, and he popped the cap open. 

“Of course I don’t,” Rich said, still holding Mike’s gaze and holding up his bottle, waiting for Mike to toast. “That’s between you two.”

“I-- Ah, god, forget it!” Mike frowned and clicked his bottle against Rich’s. “Here’s to starting over completely.”

“I’ll drink to that!” Rich said, and he tipped his bottle toward his mouth as Mike did the same, pretending to take a few big swallows while he watched Mike actually do so.

Mike winced like he didn’t love the taste, then took a few more swallows anyway. Rich just smiled at him placidly, waiting. He would be able to get back to his video game soon after all. This really hadn’t taken very long. 

“Rich,” Mike said, his eyes going wide. His hand was shaking when he set the beer bottle down on the counter very gently, as if it was a bomb that might go off. “I-- What--” 

“You’ll be fine,” Rich said, waving his hand through the air. “You’ll see.”

“You--” Mike grabbed for his throat and forced out a cough. Dramatic as ever! “Did-- Did you just poison me?”

“No! Bye, Mike. See you in a few days.” 

Mike opened his mouth to make some further complaint, his eyes bulging in shock, and then he was gone, zapped out of thin air like a memory. 

Rich sighed and refastened the seal caps on the beers to preserve what was left of them. Maybe he’d have to send someone else into the future, someday, for their own good.

*

Mike blinks and he’s somewhere else. He was in Rich’s kitchen, being poisoned by the last person in the world he trusted, and now he’s--

He doesn’t know where. It looks like a kitchen, but not the kitchen in Rich’s grandmother’s crumbling old house, though the dimensions are roughly the same. This is some kind of sleek, futuristic kitchen out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

“Hello?” Mike says, though he’s certain he’s trespassing, also afraid to move from the precise spot where he’s standing. “Rich?”

Nobody answers. The kitchen is spotless and polished like a showroom. All the appliances are shiny stainless steel, and the cruddy linoleum floor has been replaced with some kind of smooth stone tile. It changed right under Mike’s feet. 

He flexes his toes inside his boots and lifts his hands to his face, curling his fingers. He at least looks the same: he’s wearing the same clothes he had on in Rich’s kitchen, and when he walks cautiously toward the black microwave mounted over this alien kitchen’s expensive-looking gas stove, he examines his reflection in its door and sees things as he left them: hair dyed green for that stupid fucking movie that just ruined his life, eyes wide with shock, same ring-necked t-shirt he was wearing when Rich did whatever he just did to him. 

“Hello?” he says again, quietly this time, staring at his own bug-eyed reflection. 

Nobody answers. The house smells strange, unlived in and too clean. Mike turns in a circle and hears himself doing a dumb whimper thing, out of confusion more than fear. He doesn’t feel like he’s in danger, exactly. Maybe he’s dreaming. Did Rich roofie him? Why the fuck?

He walks through the house and finds no signs of life, just spotless furniture, recently vacuumed carpets and shining hardwood floors in rooms that used to have gummy pink shag carpeting. Finally he makes it to the front room near the foyer and finds a table with a neat pile of brochures about a house for sale, which seems to be this house. Beside the glossy printouts is a small TV screen-looking thing that seems like it could be something from Star Trek, like a handheld data pad. Mike picks it up and curses when it responds to his touch, icons appearing on the little screen. 

Text at the top of the screen says WELCOME TO 322 SYCAMORE STREET! OPEN HOUSE SUNDAYS, 10AM-2PM. CLICK ANY ICON TO LEARN MORE!

That’s Rich’s address, Mike thinks, trying to ignore the other text on the little device’s screen, smaller and hovering below the welcome title. 

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

Two days and eighteen years after Jay’s twenty-second birthday, when certain incidents lead Mike to decide to leave town forever, because the thought of living even a couple of hours away from Jay was too unbearable after what happened at what was supposed to be Jay’s birthday party. 

He clicks icons on the touch pad thing, opening a blueprint of this renovated house that used to be Rich’s grandmother’s, then a document with information about the neighborhood, which seems to have changed a lot from the slightly run-down one where Mike and Rich grew up together. The screen of the touch pad is really like Trek tech, responsive to the lightest finger tap and actually way sharper and more sophisticated, graphics-wise, than the computers featured on the show. There’s an icon that opens a web browser. Mike types in ‘news,’ because he has a feeling he’s not in 2002 anymore. 

He reads for a while and feels increasingly like he’s going to throw up. A lot about the future is nothing like Trek. 

But maybe it’s still all a dream, he thinks, typing in RICH EVANS CHICAGO. Nothing helpful comes up. The name is too fucking common. Mike searches for his parents’ names. He gets a result that suggests they’re still living in the same house where he grew up, outside of Chicago and just a few minutes away from the house he’s standing in now.

He could go there and-- What? His parents barely make an attempt to understand him in the present. This is the future. Will they be disgustingly old? The thought is terrifying. He wrinkles his nose and tries searching for another name, still scowling as the results pop up. 

Then his mouth falls open, because the first result has his name attached to it, too. 

Jay’s last name is less common than Rich’s, and for that matter so is Mike’s. And there’s Jay’s full name, along with Mike’s, under the description of a website that’s advertising a video production business. 

DREAM COME TRUE VIDEOGRAPHY

_Dream Come True has some of the most competitive pricing in the industry, with wedding videos starting at $1195. We believe our work speaks for itself._

Under that are three sub-links:

 _About Mike & Jay_  
_Portfolio_  
_Pricing and Availability_

Mike’s finger hovers over the _About Mike & Jay_ link. 

“What the fuck,” he whispers, then he clicks it. 

_Co-owners Mike and Jay have been in the video production business since 2004 and have been partners since 2008. We have won "Best of Weddings" on The Knot and are five-star rated on WeddingWire. We are passionate about what we do and about working with our customers to satisfy their expectations on the day of the event and in the final product._

Mike reads this five times, trying to make sense of any of it. The idea that Jay would ever partner with him in any fashion after what just happened in 2002 is more hard to accept than the fact that he seems to have been punted eighteen years into the future. 

He clicks on the contact button and stares at the phone number listed for Dream Come True Videography. In another room there was a small office area with a phone. He could call-- And say what?

Instead, he goes to the desk in the other room and finds a pen and paper. He writes down the address for the Dream Come True studio, and the phone number, too, though he doesn’t own a cell phone or have change for a pay phone. He checks his wallet and is relieved to see that the seventy five dollars he had there back in the real world has traveled along with him to this surreal nightmare. Surely that’s enough for a bus ticket from Chicago to Milwaukee, unless future inflation has really gone crazy. 

He just needs to see this for himself. More to the point: he needs to find his future self and ask for help. Who else can he trust? Certainly not Jay, even if that diabolical shrimp did somehow convince Mike’s future self to become his business partner. Maybe Rich sent Mike here so he could save himself from this awful fate. Jay is probably close to sucking the last of the life out of Mike, if they’re still together after all these years.

Although: if that were the case, Rich probably just would have let him leave town, right? 

Nothing makes sense with the pitiful amount of information Mike has at the moment, so he stops trying to puzzle it all out and concentrates on walking to the Greyhound station, hoping it’s still there after all this time. He surveys his surroundings warily as he walks through his old neighborhood, which has undergone some kind of yuppie-fication in the past eighteen years. The lawns are immaculate and the cars in driveways look not quite as futuristic as he might have hoped but definitely expensive. He’s half-expecting the old Greyhound station to have been transformed into a twee coffee shop by the time he gets there, but it’s still just as he remembers it, scummy looking and mostly deserted when he walks inside. 

“Where’s your mask?” the guy behind the counter asks when Mike walks up to ask about the price of a bus ticket to Milwaukee. 

“Huh?” Mike says. 

“You won’t be able to board a bus without one,” the guy says. He’s old, with weary-looking eyes, peering at Mike from above a pale blue surgical mask that covers his mouth and nose. Mike had assumed he was wearing it for some sort of elderly issues reason. 

“Oh.” Mike looks around helplessly, remembering something he read in the many disturbing news items he scanned through before leaving Rich’s old house. “Uh, I forgot it, sorry--”

“I can sell you one for twenty dollars,” the guy says. “Cash only.” 

Mike has just enough cash for this and for a one way ticket to Milwaukee, and soon he’s boarding a smoky-smelling old Greyhound bus with a handful of other miserable-looking people who are all wearing masks. Mike wedges himself against the window in a seat toward the back and crosses his arms tight over his, breathing heavily into the cloth mask the old man sold him and hoping no one will try to talk to him. Everyone who boards seems determined to sit as far as away from others as possible, so it doesn’t seem like it will be a problem as the bus pulls out onto the road. 

Mike takes out the paper with the address of Dream Come True Videography and tries to force his wild heartbeat to calm. He’s not alone here, whatever this shit is. His future self will help.

He watches the passing landscape with interest, the paper with the address where he’s headed tucked safely back into the pocket of his jeans. Some things outside look alarmingly different, like the electronic traffic signs over the highway that flash warnings, saying things like DON’T GET SICK and STAY HOME and PROTECT YOURSELF & YOUR FAMILY. The passengers on the bus are silent. Many of the old landmarks Mike had looked upon fondly when he made the drive from his hometown to Jay’s are gone, or unrecognizably transformed. A few persist just as they were, but even they look strange amid the changes that have happened around them, smaller and dirtier, less alive. Mike hears someone on the bus cough and goes tense. He scrunches in on himself even more tightly and keeps his eyes on the passing landscape. 

The bus pulls into the Milwaukee station a little after three o’clock in the afternoon. Mike forgot to write down the videography shop’s hours, and all he can do is pray they’re still open as he jogs from the bus station and toward the nearby warehouse district where the Dream Come True shopfront should be, if he remembers this segment of the city right. He’s spent quite a bit of time here over the years, shooting stuff with Jay near the train tracks and in abandoned lots. It’s fucking funny, and disturbing, to think they would have settled here as middle-aged wedding video jockeys. 

He finds the shop where he expected it to be, wedged between a construction company’s storefront and a discount restaurant equipment outlet. He’s panting into the mask that covers his mouth and nose, not sure if he’s allowed to take it off out here or if some robotic police force will come arrest him if he dares to remove it. Not that he’s seen any robots yet. The future seems to be a horrible combination of dingy remnants of the world he knew and a grim, apocalyptic atmosphere of quiet dread. He can smell something burning in the distance, the faint scent of acrid smoke blown his way by the wind. 

He’s shaking as he approaches the videography shop’s front door, not entirely sure that he won’t destroy the fabric of time and space if he encounters his future self. The lights are on inside the shop, and the door opens when he pushes it, a chime sounding overhead and making his shoulders jump. The shop is clean and polished, surely the work of Jay’s fastidious ass. There are video monitors built into the wall on the left, showing two different montages of glowing wedding footage, both with the sound muted. On the right side of the room there’s a plush grey couch and a few chairs positioned around a coffee table with some glossy brochures advertising Dream Come True’s videography packages. There’s a short counter in front of a door that appears to lead to a back room, and some framed pictures of happy brides and flower arrangements on the walls, all in black and white. The shop is air conditioned, which Mike appreciates. He’s soaked in sweat from his jog from the bus station. 

“Hello?” he says, his voice muffled by the mask. 

“One sec!” someone calls from the back. “I’ll be right out!”

Jay. That’s Jay’s dorky, nasal, blissfully familiar voice. Only it’s different, a little, because--

He’s not the Jay that Mike remembers, who could pass for a fifteen year old. This Jay is old-- Only not really, but-- He looks like some kind of fucking _man_ , finally. 

Mike stares, eyes blown open wide, at the Jay who has come to stand in the doorway between the shop front and the back room. Jay is frozen in place, too, boggling. He apparently has long hair in the future, another thing Mike never would have predicted. It’s sort of limp-looking but glossy, hanging over his ears, a honey color that’s darker than the blond fuzz Mike is familiar with from the past. Jay has filled out and has, like, arm muscles, which is shocking. He’s also softer than Mike has ever seen him, still small but solid-looking. He has a thick blond beard, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, and he’s not wearing a mask, but there’s one hanging from his left ear, as if he was in the process of putting it on when he saw Mike and stopped. He’s dressed pretty unprofessionally for work, in a black v-neck t-shirt and jeans. 

“It’s me,” Mike says, blinking a sudden blurriness from his eyes. He tugs the mask down so Jay can actually hear what he’s saying. “I mean-- You-- Am I-- Here, or--? What the fuck is happening?”

“You’re asking me?” Jay says, his voice pinched. “How’d you-- Mike! What have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything! Rich gave me poisoned beer!”

Jay stares at him for a moment, wide-eyed, then barks out a shocked little laugh and pulls the mask off of his ear, walking around to the front of the counter. Mike is close to hyperventilating, not sure why he wants to run to Jay, grab him, and hold on tight. Maybe it’s because Jay is the first truly familiar thing he’s laid eyes on since Rich blinked him into the future, even with so much about him changed. 

“Rich did this?” Jay says, approaching Mike warily, his arms crossed over his chest. “Huh. I guess that makes sense.”

“No, it fucking doesn’t!”

“He gave you-- Youth serum? Is this a midlife crisis or something?”

“Midlife _what_? Fuck that, I’m only twenty-three! I was minding my own business-- Sorta, and Rich made me drink this beer, and now I’m here--”

“Sooo, wait. You’re from the past?” 

“Where the hell else would I be from? Not this apocalyptic shitshow of a future, jesus!”

“Oh god, that green hair,” Jay says, grinning like Mike’s distress is cute. “Holy shit, are you coming from 2002? That fucked up summer when we hated each other?”

“Jay!”

“What? I guess you and the me from the past haven’t figured out Rich is a powerful warlock yet, huh? Well, he is. Why’d he send you here?”

Mike tries to reply but can only manage to make a watery noise of panic before sinking to his knees on the floor of the shop he apparently owns with this blase, long-haired future Jay. 

“He didn’t explain his motives or anything?” Jay asks, kneeling down beside Mike. He puts his hand on Mike’s shoulder and squeezes a little. Mike tips forward with his hands covering his face, moaning, disoriented. “Hey, you’re okay,” Jay says, speaking more softly than Mike has ever heard before, his hand moving to Mike’s back and rubbing between his shoulderblades. “We’ll figure it out.”

Mike lets Jay rub his back and takes a couple of deep breaths to try to pull himself together before sitting up to look into Jay’s face again. It’s fucked up, how much it’s clearly him but so different, too. His teeth are straighter, his facial hair is thick and well-groomed rather than pathetic and confounding, and he’s looking at Mike with a kind of trusting sweetness that Mike had assumed he would never see again, considering the things they said to each other back in 2002, when Jay’s eyes were so angry and hateful they might as well have been shooting Palpatine’s force lighting directly into Mike’s heart. 

“Where’s future me?” Mike asks.

“In Chicago with Rich,” Jay says. “He badgered you about having a ‘best friends weekend,’ whatever the fuck that is. You were extremely skeptical, but he talked you into it, and maybe this was why. He must have planned to send you here from the past while the real you-- I mean, the current you-- Is away.” 

“Planned-- What? Why the fuck would Rich-- He’s a what now?”

“We call him a warlock, but that’s mostly a joke. He’s some kind of timeless being. Mike, you look really pale. Are you going to pass out?”

“I don’t fucking know! Maybe!”

“C’mon,” Jay says, taking hold of Mike’s arm. He helps him to his feet, and he’s still holding Mike’s arm after they’re standing, rubbing it a little and smiling in a worrying way. “Holy shit,” he says, under his breath. “You’re so young.” 

“Yeah, and you’re old. Jay, what the fuck. What the fuck is happening?”

“I don’t know, but if Rich set it in motion it can’t be all bad. I’ll try to give him and my Mike a call, just-- Come here, sit on the sofa. I’ll get you a bottle of water.”

Something about the way Jay said ‘my Mike’ makes Mike’s already racing heart beat even faster, but he does as Jay instructed and accepts a bottle of water when Jay brings one out from the back room. For some reason he’s holding a little square that looks like a piece of fake plastic wood to his ear. 

“Rich didn’t pick up,” Jay says, sighing and tapping his finger against the plastic wood thing, which has a screen on the other side that looks like the one the Star Trek pad-like thing at Rich’s old house. “Should I call my Mike, or will that break the universe?”

“Call him,” Mike says. “Tell him to get his ass here and fix this.” 

“Uhh, I doubt he can, but okay.” 

Mike gulps from his water bottle and watches Jay hold the square thing that’s apparently a phone to his ear. Jay is frowning slightly as he waits for future Mike to pick up, studying the Mike in front of him with unashamed interest. Mike wants to ask what he looks like in the future, who he’s married to, and how he ended up owning a business with Jay, but he’s afraid of all the answers. 

“Hey,” Jay says, speaking into the phone, though its featureless square shape doesn’t look capable of capturing or playing audio. “I’ve got kind of a situation here. Is Rich around?”

Mike can hear the low rumble of his own voice on the other line, but he can’t make out the words. He sits watching Jay listen to whatever the other Mike is saying, his eyes crawling up and down over Jay’s body in astonishment as he calms down enough to register that future Jay is insanely hot. 

“Ah,” Jay says into the phone. “Of course.” He laughs at something the other Mike says and turns away. “Yeah,” he says, more softly. “I will. Okay. Mhmm, you too. Byyyyye.”

“Wait, what!” Mike says, leaping up off the sofa when Jay turns back to him, slightly pink cheeked now. “You just-- What did I say?”

“That Rich knows what’s going on, that he sent you here from the past to teach you a lesson.” Jay shrugs one shoulder like this is fine. “And he won’t say what it is or fix it for us. He says you’ll go back on your own when you’ve learned whatever this lesson is. Rich doesn’t usually meddle in our shit like this, so it must be something bad. Probably, uh. Something to do with that fight we had.”

Mike stares at Jay, open-mouthed and feeling newly stripped of his skin by the mention of their fight. For him, it’s still a raw, open wound. Even this Jay, eighteen years into the future, looks a little sheepish after bringing it up, like he’s thinking about some of the things his younger self said. 

“Let me talk to myself,” Mike says, holding out his hand. 

“Rich says that would be extraordinarily dangerous.”

“Bullshit! Gimme that phone!” 

“Would you even know how to use it?” Jay asks. He grins and backs away when Mike stomps toward him. 

Mike snarls at Jay and snatches the phone. He wants to throw it at Jay’s head when Jay stands there snickering, because he was right. Mike has no idea how to use this thing, which is locked to a screen with the time and outdoor temperature on it, nothing else. 

“Look,” Jay says when Mike glares at him. “My Mike is a little freaked out and annoyed at Rich, but we both trust this’ll all be okay in the end. Rich says it’s important. Maybe something would have gotten messed up if he didn’t intervene.” Jay shuffles in place and holds out his hand. “Can I have my phone back, please?”

“Why do you keep calling him your Mike?” Mike asks, still holding Jay’s phone.

Jay’s eyebrows go up, then he laughs. He’s still blushing, more brightly now. 

“Oh jesus,” he says. “How to break the news to you.”

“What news? Huh?”

Mike can feel his face getting hot, too. Maybe this whole thing is an elaborate joke Rich is playing on him. But that’s not really Rich’s style, magical powers or not. 

“Umm,” Jay says. “They told me I should just take you home and watch out for you until you’ve learned your lesson--”

“What goddamn lesson?” 

“I don’t know! Rich wouldn’t tell us. He says everything will be fine if I just hunker down with you somewhere safe.” 

Jay pushes his long hair back with his hand, and that’s when Mike notices the wedding ring on his finger. It’s thick and metal gray. 

“What will your wife think about that?” Mike asks. 

Jay sputters a little, then laughs hard. Now his face is red.

“Oh god,” he says, wincing. “Mike--”

“What? What, Jay!”

“Ughhh,” Jay says, shifting from one foot to another. “You’re not going to believe me, probably, but I don’t have a wife.”

“Okay,” Mike says, mumbling. He has certain assumptions and theories about Jay, some of which had lead to their fight. “I guess gay marriage is legal now, huh?”

“Yes,” Jay says. He looks nervous, like he thinks that Mike will judge him for being gay, which is such horseshit that Mike wants to get into a screaming fight about it all over again. 

“So your husband, then. What will he think when you bring me home?”

“I guess he’s just got to roll with it, because he’s you.” 

“What the hell does that mean?”

“What do you think it means, Mike? I married you. We’re a couple.”

“That’s fucking impossible.”

Jay rolls his eyes and steps forward to snatch his phone out of Mike’s hand while he’s still struck dumb and speechless by this claim. Somehow it seems both impossible and clearly true, like something Mike knew as soon as he heard Jay refer to the Mike in the future as _my Mike_. 

“Yeah, sometimes it’s still pretty hard to believe,” Jay says, red faced and shifty eyed. “But it’s true, at least in my timeline. Come home with me and I’ll, uh. Show you.”

Mike says nothing as Jay drives him away from the shop in an unimpressive, not futuristic car, toward whatever home they apparently have together. He feels ill and kind of giddy at the same time, as if he really got one over on Jay by marrying him in the future, which is fucking insane. He should be mourning the life that Jay stole from him, because of course Mike never got over him, of course. 

“Why’s the world so fucked up in the future?” Mike mutters when they’re pulling up to a little house not far from the videography shop, two stories with a porch out front and a lawn that looks slightly charred by the summer. 

“Uhh,” Jay says. He parks in the driveway and turns to Mike, shrugging. “I think it already was pretty fucked up. We just didn’t notice back then, how bad things actually were.”

“They weren’t bad,” Mike says, and then he remembers their fight and how he felt like dying afterward, so maybe they were.

“Well, if it’s any consolation, you and me are personally pretty happy. I think. Although-- We might be going bankrupt if this keeps up much longer.”

“This?”

“People not wanting to have weddings. Never mind-- Don’t worry. It’ll be okay. Let’s get inside, it’s so hot today.” 

Mike follows Jay into the house, holding the mask he bought at the bus station back in Oak Forest. It’s all he has to his name in this reality, aside from Jay, maybe, conditionally, in some way adjacent to whatever they are together in the future. Husbands, apparently, and co-owners of a successful but also suddenly failing business. Mike supposes it makes sense, based on what little he knows about what’s going on, that weddings would be on hold. It makes him even more depressed, and he’s ashamed of how badly he wants to curl up on the big couch in the house’s cozy living room and put his head in Jay’s lap. 

“Sooo, this is our house,” Jay says, while Mike peers at the pictures on the mantle. There are only two framed photographs: one of him and Jay when they were younger than Jay is now, wearing white collar shirts and loosened ties, Mike’s arm hooked around Jay’s throat while Jay beams his still crooked smile and Mike gives the camera a look like he’s threatening to kill whomever is taking the picture. The other one is more recent, a picture that one of them must have taken while holding the camera overhead. They’re dressed in t-shirts and appear to be in bed together, Mike’s face hovering next to Jay’s with the same menacing look in his eyes as in the other picture, only this time he’s fat, balding, and looking even more smug, his mouth quirked into a half-grin. Jay is glowy and beautiful beside him, with shorter hair than he has now, his smile showing straightened teeth.

“Holy shit,” Mike says, looking from one picture to the other while Jay stands behind him with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, awaiting a reaction. “I’m fat?”

“I’m into it,” Jay says, shrugging when Mike turns to gape at him. 

“Was this our wedding?” Mike asks, pointing at the one of them when they were younger, in fancy clothes.

“Oh god no. That was taken after a wedding we were working, uhh, one we filmed. I just like that picture of you. Obviously I still looked like shit.”

Mike sneers in disagreement but doesn’t say anything. He turns back to the pictures, then takes in the rest of the room: framed movie posters on the walls, an enormous flat screen television that he would have assumed only a rich person could afford, and a couple of Jay’s goofy horror movie trinkets on the mantle alongside the pictures. There’s no real decorative scheme, but the place looks both lived-in and clean.

“I just got a text from you,” Jay says, holding up his phone. “Well, the other you. He’s asking if I’m being nice to you.” 

“I want to talk to him.”

“Rich says you can’t! Just talk to me, like. What do you want to know?”

Mike rolls his eyes. Where to fucking begin? He feels exhausted after the bus ride and the run from the station to the shop, and also like he stinks. 

“How’d this happen?” Mike asks, pointing at the picture of them in bed together. 

“I can’t tell you the details,” Jay says, looking a little panicked. “That might wreck it.”

“Rich said so?”

“No, just. I want it to happen exactly like it did, um. The short version is we just got closer and closer as the years went on, and one day we decided to try fucking, and no, I’m not gonna tell you whose idea it was.”

Mike snorts. He’s pretty sure it was his idea. He might have even introduced it as a ‘joke,’ like the kiss he wrote into the movie that Jay lost his shit over, the thing that lead to their fight. But this Jay said yes to the suggestion of Mike’s ‘joke’ about fucking, and it really happened? Holy shit.

“And we loved it,” Jay says, mumbling. “So we just-- Kept doing it. Until we were doing it every night, so we lived together, for practical reasons, and then you made me marry you.”

Jay is still so cute, even with that beard. Maybe especially with it, though Mike kind of misses the sight of his weird upper lip. This Jay is perfectly situated between cute and hot, which is unfair. Mike takes an uncertain step toward him, feeling like he should do something but not sure what the fuck that thing is.

“I guess you can’t imagine it,” Jay says, a little bitterly. “Yet, or. From your perspective.”

“We just had that fight. Yesterday, for me.”

“Ah.” Jay makes a ‘yikes’ face, exposing his still crooked bottom teeth, then stretches his arms up over his head. Doing so makes the hem of his t-shirt lift, showing Mike a pale strip of skin on his belly. “Well, what can I say. I was a little fucked up, back then. A lot fucked up, actually. And you-- You were pretty patient with me, in hindsight. But it didn’t seem that way at the time.” 

“Jay--” 

“You hungry? Want a shower or something? Want to see the backyard?”

Mike nods tiredly, not sure which of those subject changes he’s agreeing to. He doesn’t really want to talk about the fight either. Or, he does, desperately-- But not with this Jay. 

Jay shows Mike the backyard. There’s not much to it other than a covered hot tub on a concrete slab and some weedy grass, and a little shed that houses their lawnmower. Mike trails Jay back into the house and stands in the kitchen watching him toast some frozen Eggos for Mike to eat. Jay keeps looking at Mike like he’s sneaking embarrassed peeks at a boy he has a crush on, quickly averting his eyes when he sees that, every time, Mike is openly staring at him, sad-eyed and not sure why he feels robbed of something, like maybe Rich is lying and he won’t get to go back. He imagines seducing this hot older Jay away from his older self and grins at the thought.

“What’s funny?” Jay asks, cocking his head.

“Nothing.” Mike puts his shoulders back, coming to his full height and giving Jay the burning stare that he used to think Jay would never notice or appreciate. “What was our wedding like?”

“Courthouse.”

“Ah. Of course. So you still hate romantic shit?”

“Yes, completely.”

Mike snorts. “Ironic, then, that you ended up with a wedding video company.”

“It was your idea.”

“Of course it was,” Mike says, but not because he’s a romantic. Of course he made a plan for their lives and Jay followed along. How could he not see it coming? Now it feels predestined in the strangest way, and Mike is quickly growing smug about it as the shock recedes. Earlier today, he never would have imagined that getting proof of being unable to escape Jay’s clutches would feel like a relief. 

The timer on the toaster dings and Jay startles. Mike remains calm, watching him retrieve the Eggos. 

“What lesson do you think Rich wants me to learn?” Mike asks. 

“Who knows. I was thinking, because of the timing, maybe something would have gone wrong if he didn’t send you back.”

“Wrong like how.”

“Like us never speaking to each other again?” Jay looks up from the plate where he’s arranged Mike’s waffles. He’s holding it with both hands like an offering. “Or, even. Maybe we would have made up, but still would have been secretly fucked up about it for even longer than we were.” 

Mike grunts and shrugs. He takes the plate and eats the waffles in about five bites, too hungry to bother waiting for butter or syrup. 

“Oh fuck,” he says, chewing. “Maybe I should start having a better diet. Is that the lesson?”

“You really think that’s a lesson Rich would care to teach you?”

“Ah. Good point. Do you have beer?”

“What do you take me for?” Jay makes a fake offended face before beaming at Mike and turning for the fridge. “Of course we have beer. This is _your_ house, too, Mike.”

Mike’s heart grows three sizes, hearing that. He’s got a stupid smile on his face when Jay turns to hand him a beer. 

“Just tell me one thing, Jay,” Mike says after Jay has opened a beer for himself and toasted his bottle against Mike’s.

“What?” Jay asks, eyes narrowing like he knows what’s coming. 

“Am I on top? When we fuck?”

“Ugh,” Jay says. He holds his beer bottle over his burning face like he can hide behind it. “Yes,” he says, muttering, when he meets Mike’s eyes again. 

“Yesssss!” Mike says, lifting his beer into the air. “I knew it.”

“Ha, well, you don’t know everything. Sometimes you want me to-- Uhh. Switch places with you. I’m the one who doesn’t like it that way.”

“Oh, Jay. Sure.”

“It’s true! God, you were such an asshole back-- Then.” 

Jay gestures at Mike’s current form to indicate 2002 era Mike, but he’s also grinning and laughing a little under his breath, clearly charmed. 

“Did we make any more movies together?” Mike asks, his boastful feeling shrinking away more and more with each word. Because he fears he knows the answer.

Jay sighs and drinks from his beer.

“Sorta,” he says. “They didn’t really go anywhere, but there were a couple more attempts before we really focused on the videography stuff. But, Mike-- I like it, honestly. You always act like you think I’m lying when I say so, but I don’t miss trying to make no budget movies. It was a huge pain in the ass.”

“Yeah,” Mike mutters, heartbroken by that. “I know. Totally.”

“You’ll see-- When you’re older.”

“Oh, fuck you!”

Jay snickers and grabs Mike’s elbow, pulling him toward the stairs.

“Where are we going?” Mike asks, hoping it’s directly to bed. He feels like he’s waited long enough. 

“When’s the last time you showered?” Jay asks, wrinkling his nose to show Mike it’s been too long. 

“Uhh, I dunno. At some point before our fight, before you took away my will to live.” 

“Oh, jesus. Come use our shower. I’ll give you privacy.” 

“Nnh, what if I don’t want it?”

Mike waggles his eyebrows when Jay turns back to him, halfway up the stairs. Jay is still holding Mike’s arm, like he’s going to need to push him into the tub and scrub the grime away himself. Mike is not at all opposed to that. 

“I have been thinking,” Jay says, his voice a little thick. “Or-- We both have. You texted me-- My Mike did, um. About that.”

“He did? That fucker, is he getting all possessive and forbidding you to touch me?”

“Uhh, not exactly. Go take a shower, Mike. Bathroom’s right there.”

Jay points, and Mike obeys, turning back to give Jay a smoldering look of seduction on the way there. Jay mostly looks queasy and a little lost, but also interested.

Alone in the bathroom, Mike stares at himself in the mirror, trying not to think about the greying, bloated version of himself in that picture on the mantle, though he has to admit future Mike was actually pulling off the untouchable cocky energy he tries and worries he’s failing to project. And Jay said he’s into it, whatever ‘it’ is. Fat guys? Maybe. It’s possible that Mike didn’t successfully seduce Jay until he’d packed on some pounds. All the more reason to enjoy as many beers as he likes between now and then.

He strips off his clothes while the water warms up, and it’s weird to be naked in a strange house, but at the same time this place doesn’t feel altogether unfamiliar. Maybe it’s because it smells like future him in some way he can’t put his finger on, or maybe because it smells like Jay, who always makes him feel at home, until recently. When they fought it was like suddenly there was no place left on Earth where Mike could be far enough away from that pain, which was why Key West came to mind. He didn’t exactly have the money or means to emigrate to another country, and couldn’t afford a plane ticket to Hawaii, so the southernmost part of the country it was. Now here he is, even farther away than he’d dreamed he could get, and he just wants to go back and flop himself at his Jay’s feet, even if it means getting kicked in the teeth. 

He steps into the shower and looks down at his dick, which isn’t hard but could be, if he lets himself think more about how future Jay said ‘my Mike’ and ‘we loved it’ about their first attempt at fucking. Mike wants to pester him for the details, though he knows he wouldn’t get them even if Jay wasn’t worried about messing up his precious memories of however they eventually fumbled together. For Mike it still feels like something he’ll never actually get, even in a universe where magical time travel apparently exists, because Jay won’t talk about sex with him, back home in 2002. Mike has obsessively tried to needle something out of him, anything. Which is another thing that lead to their fight. 

“Here’s a question for you,” Mike says, entering Jay’s bedroom with nothing but a towel around his waist, his damp green hair pushed back in a way that he made sure to get artful before he left the bathroom. Jay is stretched out in his bed, which Mike supposes belongs to him, too, and he’s looking up at Mike with his mouth hanging open, either stunned by his nerve or impressed by freshly showered, lanky body. Mike has never found it all that impressive, but some girls have.

“A question?” Jay says, after he’s stared for a while, still just lying there. He looks at Mike’s nipples, then up at his face again. 

“Why doesn’t Rich just fix the world, if he’s so powerful?”

“Um. Maybe that’s exactly what he’s doing, in ways mysterious to us.”

“Yeah, right. Rich is content to hide in his video game cave forever. That’s why we’re all screwed, probably.”

“Hey, now.” Jay sits up and adjusts his t-shirt over the little roll of pudge at his waist. “Don’t bad mouth Rich. I’m sure he’s doing his best. And we’re not screwed. We’ll be okay. C’mere.”

“Come-- There?” Mike’s eyebrows shoot up. He didn’t expect his first attempt at seduction to work. 

“Yeah.” Jay grins and pats the bed. “My Mike wants me to show you a good time. He thinks it’ll help.”

“Help?” Mike says, lingering in the doorway. Maybe he’s in over his head. He has no idea how to do gay sex, and this Jay looks so self-assured and calm, with none of the insecure monster energy that the Jay that Mike left behind in the past has been giving off lately. 

“Apparently I hurt you real bad,” Jay says, trying to say so in a jokey voice but looking torn up about it for real. “Back then-- I guess I knew, but-- Uh. I could give you a hug. And some other things.”

“You’re just taking me right to bed, huh?” Mike says, smirking so it will seem like he finds this more amusing than intimidating. “You horny old perv.” 

“Honestly? There’s really nothing else to do. I can’t exactly take you on a tour of the beautiful future. And it’s making me have some kind of-- Emotion, seeing you like this again.”

“That’s called an erection, Jay, not an emotion.”

Jay laughs, and the sight of his cute little face scrunching up with joy at one of Mike’s jokes floods Mike’s whole chest with warmth that he didn’t even know he needed as badly as he did. He feels himself smiling for real and takes a step closer to the bed. Jay doesn’t actually have an erection, at least as far as Mike can see, which is pretty far considering how tight future Jay wears his jeans. Mike just can’t believe that Jay is confessing to experiencing a Mike-related emotion, even if he refuses to say which one it is. 

“I’m still mad at you, Jay,” Mike says, putting one knee on the bed. He’s getting hard under the towel, mostly for the way Jay is sort of splayed out and surrendered for him, his knees tipped apart while he reclines in bed, waiting.

“That’s okay,” Jay says. His gaze feels hot against Mike’s, tempting. “I like it when you fuck me like you’re pissed off.” 

Mike moans at that and moves his fingers along the edge of the towel to suggest he’s about to remove it. His anxious heart is pounding, but this whole twisted experience is finally starting to feel like a good dream. He flings the towel away and hears Jay’s breath catch, his eyes sneaking downward. 

“Did you ever see me like this, back in the day?” Mike asks, resisting the urge to touch his dick. He’s already gonna come way too fast, if Jay touches him. “Naked?”

“Nope,” Jay says, now staring at Mike’s dick as it rises to point at him. “Not till much later.”

“ _Much_ later?” Mike says, crushed by the thought of how long he’ll have to wait to have this again, if he does make it back to his time. 

“Don’t be sad,” Jay says. “Waiting made it better. I wanted you, um. Real bad, by then.” 

“And how about now.”

Jay snorts and rolls his eyes but he’s also flushing, and his legs are still spread apart as if to invite Mike to crawl between them. He seems bigger than the Jay that Mike knows, though he really isn’t, aside from a few pounds and those arm muscles, which Mike wants to bite. He climbs onto the bed, pretending to be fearless, and looms over Jay to prove he’s still the bigger one. He can’t bring himself to flop down into Jay’s arms, on top of him. It feels like it’s not allowed, even with Jay there waiting for him, practically panting for it.

“I forgot about this,” Jay says, beaming up at Mike’s face like he’s entertaining but not particularly sexy. “How you’d give me this serial killer face at the start.”

“I’m-- Not, what?”

“Come here, you dork.”

Jay sits up and puts his hands on Mike’s waist, pulling him down until he’s stretched out on his side, facing Jay. Mike shivers all over for the feeling of Jay’s hands on his skin and makes a pathetic noise that he regrets very much. He hides his face against Jay’s throat when Jay’s arms close around him, not sure what to do next. Jay doesn’t seem to expect him to know. He hooks his leg over Mike’s hip and pulls him in closer, squeezing him tight. It’s the kind of shameless hug Mike never thought Jay would give to anyone, even in private, let alone him. He’s pretty sure he even feels Jay kiss the top of his head, soft enough to almost go unnoticed.

“I forgot how terrified you looked all the time,” Jay says, stroking Mike’s hair and seeming to be speaking mostly to himself.

“I don’t-- Did not!” Mike rears back to frown at Jay, though he’s not ready to stop being held by him. He’s fully hard now, and so is Jay. “Ha,” Mike says, bringing the heel of his hand down to hover over the bump of Jay’s dick in his jeans, not quite daring to rest it there. “You’ve got a boner for me, Jay.”

“I guess it would shock you to learn that I’ve had thousands of boners for you, Mike. A whole lifetime of them, really.”

Mike plunges toward Jay’s mouth to give him an angry, possessive kiss on the lips, thinking of their fight and what it was really about. He smashes his eyes shut and licks past Jay’s lips, ignoring it when Jay laughs a little at Mike’s clumsy approach. Mike is normally a good kisser, or so he’s been told. There’s just something about Jay that makes doing this with him seem extremely advanced, and Mike feels like he’s playing catch up when Jay licks across his parted lips with patient strokes of his tongue. Jay cups Mike’s face in his hand, holding him steady and guiding the pace, his thumb pressed snugly along the line of Mike’s jaw. He has his eyes open when Mike peeks, his tongue still pushed into Jay’s mouth. Jay tastes like coffee, and aside from that just so fucking good, like Mike knew he would, somehow.

“Mph,” Jay says. His eyes are sort of sparkling when Mike pulls back. “I missed you.”

“You-- You mean you prefer this version of me?”

“What? No.” Jay snickers and uses his knee to wedge Mike’s legs apart, pushing his leg up between Mike’s thighs. “I meant because you’ve been in Chicago for two days. We’re almost never apart, it’s embarrassing. The last girl you tried to date called us a codependent nightmare, even before we’d fucked.” 

“Well. Uh. I missed you, too.” 

Mike can’t make linear time-based sense of what he just said, but he knows it’s true. He kisses Jay again, deeply, and moans when Jay rubs his thigh up higher, between Mike’s trembling legs. Mike angles himself so he can hump Jay’s leg, not caring that his unchecked need to get off is humiliating. Every time he pulls back Jay is looking at him like he’s allowed to do anything, and like he’s amazing just for existing. Mike is missing eighteen years of their history together, but he feels caught up at once by that look in Jay’s eyes and the way he keeps touching Mike’s hair. He’s never felt so loved by anybody in his life. 

“Oh juh, jesus,” Mike says when Jay finally reaches down to touch his dick, stroking him with a confident suredness that makes his toes curl. 

“God,” Jay mutters, his lips bumping against Mike’s. “Your face.”

“Wh, what about it?”

“Just, unf. I never got to see you, like this, back then.”

“Yeah, whose fault was that?”

Mike moans and forces his eyes open, trying to focus on Jay’s expression while Jay holds his cock like it belongs to him, letting it throb in the circle of his fingers. 

“My fault,” Jay says, in the sharp, prissy way that makes Mike’s blood run cold with dread. “But yours, too. You pushed at me like a fucking open wound, you never let it scab over--” 

“Oh, sick, stop! Don’t talk about scabs while you’re jerking me off.”

Jay snickers and pushes Mike onto his back, letting go of his dick in the process of clambering on top of him. Mike can’t help grinning up at him, though he feels a little torn open, too. The warm weight of Jay on his chest and against his dick is like a bandage for all his bad feelings, and it feels so good to wrap his arms around Jay’s neck while they kiss and squirm against each other. Jay tastes like everything’s going to be okay, and this whole pocket in time is supposed to be proof of that. Mike gasps into Jay’s mouth and rapidly doesn’t want to be anywhere else but spread out underneath him, ever.

“How fast are you gonna come in my mouth if I put it on your dick?” Jay asks, murmuring this into Mike’s ear like a taunt. 

Mike groans powerfully, which is probably answer enough. He blinks up at Jay, feverish with arousal and feeling overly exposed when Jay moves down to kneel between his legs. 

“How come you’ve still got your clothes on?” Mike asks, resting his foot over the bulge of Jay’s dick, against the fly of his jeans. 

“Mhm,” Jay says. He lifts one shoulder and shifts his hips forward to hump Mike’s foot a little. “You’ll get to see everything, don’t worry.”

“Not worried.” Mike puts more pressure against Jay’s dick and grins when he moans. 

“Just impatient,” Jay says, and he pushes Mike’s foot away. “Be still. You’re my student, okay? Gonna teach you some shit.” 

“Yeah,” Mike says, grinning so widely that he feels like his skull might split. “Isn’t the other me jealous, though?” he asks, glancing around in search of Jay’s phone. 

“Are you kidding?” Jay lowers his mouth toward Mike’s dick, watching his face. “Who do you think _told_ me to do this?”

“Oh fuck-- Me?”

“Yeah, Mike, you. Want me to show you the text? I’d better not, in case it breaks the universe. But it was something like-- ‘Show me how you like to be fucked, so I’ll know.’” 

“Make me an expert,” Mike says, nodding madly in agreement with himself. Surely this is the lesson he’s meant to learn, or at least part of it. “Jesus, I guess-- The me who’s in Chicago already has this memory?”

“He does. The fucker. So unfair. Now we’re gonna have it, too, you and me.”

As Jay predicted, Mike barely lasts a minute in his mouth. Mike has had blow jobs before, but never from a guy, and never from the love of his life, who has that fucking mouth he’s been obsessed with since he first saw what Jay looked like via a VHS tape he’d received in the mail. Even back then there had been something flirty about the way they inched toward each other via various modes of media and then finally live and in person, at least for Mike. Jay was awkward looking at best in those old movies, but something about every irregular shape of him fit into all of Mike’s psychosexual slots perfectly, taking them both off guard. By the third or fourth time they met up in person Mike was sullen with something it would still take him a while to pin on longing, and for what.

“Mhm, you taste the same,” Jay says, looking satisfied with the result after he’s swallowed Mike’s come and crawled up to nuzzle at his jaw. Mike is still reeling, groping for Jay’s hip and turning his face against Jay’s, breathing hard onto Jay’s lips but too happily shattered after coming in his mouth to even try for a kiss yet. Then he considers that if he does he’ll learn the taste of his own jizz on Jay’s hot little tongue, so he plunges his tongue in that direction blindly, pulling Jay against him. Jay laughs and kisses him back, letting Mike moan into his mouth. 

“Take it off,” Mike says, pushing Jay’s t-shirt out of the way to feel him up a little. He’s warm, and hairier than Mike expected, the perfect amount of squishy versus solid. 

“You do it,” Jay says, sitting up.

Mike sits up with a grunt and yanks Jay’s t-shirt off for him, throwing it aside without breaking eye contact. Jay’s lips are shiny and extra pink after his work on Mike’s dick, kinda puffy. Mike can’t stop kissing him, but when he dives forward to it again Jay stops him, his hand pressing against Mike’s chest. 

“Kiss me here,” Jay says, tilting his head to give Mike access to the side of his throat. “I like-- That, _ah_ , yeah--”

Jay holds Mike’s head in place while Mike licks and nips at his neck, not even pretending to have technique. He tries everything and listens to Jay’s little noises, pausing to give extra attention to the spots where he can make Jay gasp or shiver. When he reaches down to squeeze one of Jay’s softish pecs while still sucking at his throat, Jay moans. 

“You like that, huh?” Mike says, pulling back to watch Jay’s face while he thumbs at Jay’s nipple, which is stiff despite the warmth in the room that’s seeping in from outside and generated by their bodies. 

“God yeah,” Jay says. His forehead thunks against Mike’s when he presses into the touch, eyes closed. “Mmph, you can-- Use your mouth. Teeth, too.” 

Mike pushes Jay onto his back and does as he was told, licking and sucking on Jay’s tits and reaching down to rub Jay’s cock through his jeans when he writhes up against Mike’s mouth, his fingers anchored in Mike’s hair to keep him in place. Mike feels, already, like he’s good at this. Jay looks wrecked and floaty, and he keeps giving Mike dopey smiles of approval. Mike drags his teeth against Jay’s nipple, tonguing it at the same time, then bites it just hard enough to hurt a little. Jay makes a high pitched sound and pulls on Mike’s hair. Mike is already getting hard again. 

Good, he thinks, his heart slamming as he rests his cheek on Jay’s chest to feel that his heart is beating hard, too. He’s going to need to fuck Jay soon, feels like they might both die if he doesn’t. A kind of invincible-seeming power is surging through Mike now, like he’s fulfilling some prophecy of his full potential, because he actually fucking is, gulping up this taste of his ultimate destiny in greedy mouthfuls. He finds Jay’s left hand and threads their fingers together, thumbing at Jay’s wedding ring. 

“Mm, yeah,” Jay says, breathing this out like praise when Mike moves between his legs and starts working open his jeans. “Jesus, you make me feel, like-- I’m not gonna last long.” 

“Really?” Mike doesn’t bother to conceal how giddy this information makes him. He shrugs one shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. I’m the one who needs to stay hard.”

“You won’t last either,” Jay says, as if he knows better. Mike supposes he does, but still opens his mouth to refute this before Jay says, “Inside me, I mean.”

The words _inside me_ blank away the smart ass comment Mike was going to make, and when it’s forgotten he leans in to kiss Jay’s belly, tugging his opened pants down. 

“How long’d I last the first time?” Mike asks. “I mean-- When it was the first time for you.” He can’t think too much about how they’ll both have a different first time with each other, this way. 

“Uhh,” Jay says, lifting his hips to help Mike strip his jeans off. “Long enough.”

“Did you come on my cock, Jay.”

Jay wrinkles his nose and yanks Mike back onto him when his pants are off, revealing a sticky wet spot over the head of his cock, against his straining grey boxer briefs. 

“I’m not gonna spoil the surprise,” he says after Mike has kissed him, and that’s okay. Mike wasn’t really expecting an answer, and feels like he knows for sure, anyway: of course Jay will come on his dick. He’ll go crazy for it, he’ll come so hard.

“These are in my way,” Mike says, shoving at Jay’s briefs while kissing him. 

Jay doesn’t object to this plan, and they’re both staring down between their bodies as his dick pops free from the waistband. Mike groans at the sight of it and moves down to kiss the wet head before Jay even has his sticky underwear all the way off. He used to have reservations about sucking dick, but they never applied to Jay’s. He tastes warm and clean, salty along his leaking slit, and feels perfect in Mike’s hand, just big enough to fill it completely and almost disappear inside Mike’s fist when he squeezes and pumps.

“What happened to my instructions?” Mike asks, pinching the tender inside of Jay’s thigh while he fucks himself up through Mike’s fingers, his head lolling on the mattress. 

“How’s this,” Jay says, blinking down at Mike from over his heaving chest. “Suck my dick, you smart ass punk.” 

Mike pinches him again, and grins when Jay yelps, his thighs jerking in Mike’s grip as he looms between them, holding Jay’s legs open. Jay is breathing hard, digging his fingernail in against one nipple while he watches Mike’s face. He won’t stop looking at Mike, can’t seem to get enough of the sight of him. He does it in 2002, too. It’s so cruel that he’ll only let Mike look back at him, there.

“I’ll suck your cock if you tell me one thing,” Mike says, hovering his face close to the head as it pulses for him, pushing out another fat drop of precome. 

“What?” Jay asks. He sighs and pushes his long hair back with his hand, leaving his arm tucked behind his head after he has. He knows he looks good, Mike realizes, kinda wanting to punish him for this. 

“When’d you first beat off to the thought of me fucking you. Be honest.” 

“Oh god. I dunno. Uhh. Actually, maybe not until after we fought. I felt guilty, and I’d think about you kicking my ass, the way it seemed like you wanted to. Just beating the shit out of me.”

“Jesus, Jay!” Mike rubs his thumbs into Jay’s spread apart thighs, gentle, over the marks he left when he pinched them. 

“Uhh, yeah. Then it became kind of-- Erotic, in these fantasies. Or maybe it always was.” 

Mike gives Jay a long, sad stare and kisses the inside of his left thigh, where he’s so soft and warm. Jay sighs. He reaches down to stroke Mike’s hair, then grabs a handful of it and smirks at Mike’s look of surprise as Jay pulls his mouth toward his cock.

“Get to work,” Jay says, in a little voice that’s either mocking or authentically meek, begging. 

“Wouldn’t you rather show me how to make you come on my cock?” Mike asks. He’s just breathing onto Jay’s dick, which is so hard it must hurt. 

“We can do that next time,” Jay says. He eases his grip on Mike’s hair and pets him there softly again. “My Mike isn’t getting home till tomorrow night. I’m supposed to keep you in bed till then, like a good host.” 

“Jesus christ,” Mike says, almost tearful for the thought. His dick is hard enough to hurt now, too, again. “This is kinda fucked up, you know? I love how fucked up it is,” he adds, hurriedly, as if Jay can’t tell. 

“That was basically our wedding vows,” Jay says, grinning down at him. He shifts his hips to drag his dick against Mike’s mouth, whining for attention there. 

“Are you a little pillow prince or what?” Mike asks, grabbing Jay’s hips to pin them to the bed. 

Jay laughs hard, throwing his head back and squirming against Mike’s grip on him. 

“How do you know that term?” he asks when he can talk again, red-faced.

“Can’t remember, but I think that’s a yes.” He knows it from looking online for gay porn featuring little blond guys, but he’s not gonna say that now.

It’s weird that Mike has never felt hotter but also more clever than he does now, in bed with Jay, who’s all blushy and spread out for him, dripping precome while Mike teases him. Or maybe it’s not weird at all that Mike feels like his best self in every way, stretched out between Jay’s shaky legs. His whole fucking soul is singing when he wraps his lips around Jay’s cock and envelopes him in the heat of his mouth, and he shivers down the length of his back for how good it feels to hear Jay whimper softly and to feel him dig his heels into Mike’s sides, clamping him in place.

“Wait,” Jay gasps out when Mike has sucked his cock for not nearly long enough, in Mike’s view. Mike pulls free when Jay grabs a handful of his hair and tugs. “I, ah, I want-- You’re right,” Jay says, hot-faced and fluttering his eyelashes at Mike, probably not on purpose. “I want to come when you put it in,” he says, mumbling this out, suddenly bashful.

“I know you do,” Mike says, and he surges up to give Jay a messy kiss on the lips. “I don’t really need lessons, do I? Didn’t I _always_ know just what you needed, Jay?”

Jay narrows his eyes a little, so Mike isn’t totally taken off guard by the way he bites at Mike’s lower lip when they kiss again. Mike just laughs. It hurts, but he doesn’t care. He’s wanted Jay to bite him all over for years now.

“If you’re such an expert,” Jay says when Mike pulls back to grin at him, lip throbbing, “Why don’t you find the lube and get me ready.”

Mike feels his face fall, and he nips at Jay’s jaw when he laughs. Okay, fine, Mike doesn’t know anything about ass stuff. He’s seen porn, he knows you’re supposed to stretch the guy open, but the thought of doing it makes him feel instantly out of his depth.

“Don’t worry,” Jay says, again in that mocking little voice that might be sincere, too. He sits up on his elbows and nudges his nose against the stubble on Mike’s jaw. “I’ll show you how.”

“Jay,” Mike says, overcome by how good he smells and how fucking sweet it is to collapse on top of him, so much of his skin pressed to so much of Jay’s. They’re both a little sweaty, and Mike is so hard, he can’t keep his hips from twitching when they’re lying together, rutting his cock against Jay’s hip. 

“Mhm,” Jay says, and he’s all twinkly-eyed, too, when Mike pulls up to look at him again. 

“I love you so much it hurts,” Mike says, because he can’t hold it in anymore. It comes out sounding like a grievance, because it is one. 

“Aww,” Jay says, and he nudges Mike aside in a clear attempt to dodge this emotional outburst.

“I mean it,” Mike says, though he knows he sounds whiny and corny and dumb. Jay is digging for the lube in a drawer beside the bed. “You’re killing me, Jay. Back in the past, I mean. This is all good stuff, this here.” 

“Well, you have to go through that shit to get here, sorry.” 

Mike expects Jay to be annoyed with him when he turns back to the bed with the lube, but he looks sort of broken up, worried. Mike scoots up to rest his head on the pillows that are piled near the headboard. He presses himself to Jay’s side again and peers up at him, now only begging with his eyes for Jay to change things about the past that he has no control over, from here.

“I was killing me, too,” Jay says. He puts the bottle of lube in the center of Mike’s chest and looks down at it, balancing it on his sternum. “You don’t even know how bad I’m gonna get.”

“To me?” Mike asks, his voice actually cracking with distress.

Jay shakes his head, still avoiding Mike’s eyes. 

“No, to myself. But I’ll be with you, all the time. As your-- Friend, co-worker, whatever. I’ll be, ah god. So miserable, for a while. But I won’t let it show.”

“Jay!” Mike grabs him with both arms, awkwardly cradling him. Jay snickers under his breath and finally meets Mike’s eyes, shrugging.

“Maybe it’ll be different, now that you’ve been here,” he says. “Now that you’ve seen how things turn out.”

“It can’t be, or you’d remember it different.”

“Is that how it works?”

“I’m-- Not sure, actually. Call Rich and ask him.”

“No! Mike, don’t worry. Everything will be okay. I’m not kidding about the wait making it better, even if that sounds sick from where you’re sitting. By the time I finally let myself have you, jesus fucking christ. Well. I won’t spoil it. But it’s so, so good.” 

They kiss for a while, comforting each other through the uncertainty-- or the certainty, in Jay’s case. Mike keeps his arms locked around Jay, and he sighs and spreads his legs open with a flush that moves down along his throat when Jay reaches between their overheated bodies to grip Mike’s cock. Jay lets go almost as soon as he’s felt how hard Mike is, probably afraid to make him come.

“Hold your hand out,” Jay says, flicking open the cap on the lube. 

Mike is a patient student for Jay’s ass-handling lessons, despite the fact that he’s aching to come, his dick throbbing for how hot Jay feels inside, and how his breath changes and stutters when Mike does certain things with his fingers, Jay's cock twitching back toward hardness against Mike’s stomach. They’re facing each other, with Jay’s leg hitched up over Mike’s side to give him access to reach around and open him up. Mike can’t stop kissing him, and Jay doesn’t seem to mind. He’s finally leaving his eyes closed for more than a few seconds at a time, whining softly from the back of his throat and pushing his hips back when Mike isn’t going fast enough for him.

Mike wants to say more stuff about love, but he holds it in for Jay’s sake, and because his throat is all dry and tight anyway. He stops kissing Jay only so he can pull back and watch Jay’s face, the way his eyebrows pull together and his mouth hangs open as he breathes in huffs. He has his hands spread open on Mike’s chest, and his fingers curl in to squeeze a little every time Mike touches the spot inside him that makes his breath catch. He gets tight around Mike’s fingers, too, and after this has gone on for a while his noises start to get more desperate and his cock starts leaking again, onto Mike’s skin. 

“You’re all wet for me,” Mike says, rubbing the thumb on his free hand through the mess of slickness over Jay’s cockhead, spreading it in circles.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” Jay says, his eyes flying open and his hands going tense on Mike’s chest. He pushes, not gently, and Mike extracts his fingers, confused. “Now, you have to-- Now, please.”

Mike isn’t confused for long. Jay rolls onto his back and pulls his legs up against his chest, showing Mike how worked open and ready he is after all that teasing. His chest is heaving, eyes muggy. Mike leans over him on all fours and tries to breathe evenly, telling himself he won’t unload in a coma-inducing orgasm as soon as he’s all in. 

“What if right now was the moment I got sucked back to the past?” Mike asks, trying to make a joke of it but sort of panicked at the thought.

“Shut up!” Jay says, and he laughs, throwing his head back and forth on the pillow in a way that leaves several strands of his long hair stuck to his forehead when he looks up at Mike again. “You’re gonna do so good,” he says when Mike pushes his hair back for him. “For me, just-- Mike, you wanna know something?”

“What, Jay.”

“In the future, or-- Past, your future-- That first time, my first time, I’m gonna cry from how hard you fuck me and how good it feels.” 

“Jesus,” Mike says, disturbed but also reaching down to grip his cock tight at the base when it throbs with a dangerously intense pulse for what Jay just said, and for the gleeful psycho look in his eyes. 

“And you’re not gonna stop,” Jay says, framing Mike’s face with his hands. “Right? Are you? Please don’t stop, Mike, don’t stop--”

He says this like Mike is already inside him, fucking him, and they both groan when Mike bumps the head of his cock into place and slips away. 

“Too tight,” he says, frowning down at Jay and feeling enormous above him. 

“I’m really not,” Jay says. He reaches down to help Mike get into position. “There you go, it’s okay, just-- Push in, you won’t hurt me.”

Mike tries not to let his mind go totally blank with pleasure when he presses inside and keeps sinking in, watching Jay’s face. Jay is all blissed out already, using his grip on Mike’s ass to push him in deeper, clenching up around him and chewing his bottom lip. 

“Wait,” Mike says, his voice barely working. “You, you can’t-- Squeeze me like that, ah fuck I’ll come--”

“Okay,” Jay says, still doing it. “Sorry, just. It’s a reflex.” 

“How are you so tight?” Mike asks. He drops his face to hide against Jay’s neck and sort of sobs there, because his balls are pulling up and if he pushed in fast just once he’d go off. 

“It’s okay,” Jay says, petting him. “We can do it again. As many times as you want.”

Mike whimpers, overwhelmed, but this promise helps him relax enough to get himself all the way into Jay without unloading, and he feels accomplished once he has, deserving of the way Jay holds him and just lets him stay there. Mike is shaky, across his shoulders and down the back of his legs, reeling for how good it feels to melt completely into Jay and know it won’t be the last time, maybe not even the last time today.

“There,” Jay says. His breath is warm against Mike’s ear, and he’s sliding his fingertips up and down the length of Mike’s spine, where his sweat is pooling now. “That’s, mph. That’s good, so good.” 

“M’not doing anything,” Mike mutters, without lifting his face from Jay’s neck, still afraid to even move his head or risk coming. Jay is blood hot around him, so tight, squeezing up around him in tiny pulses. 

“I just mean,” Jay says, and he hesitates, maybe because he’s caught himself about to say something embarrassing. Mike nudges his nose against the throb of Jay’s pulse, urging him to say it. “Ah. That’s where you belong, okay? Hmm, yeah. Right there.”

Well, no shit, Mike wants to say, grinning against Jay’s skin. Mike could have told him that.

Mike can only thrust in slow, shallow thrusts without coming, nowhere near making Jay cry from the hard fuck he’d wanted to give him, but Jay gets kinda teary anyway, blinking fast while he stares up into Mike’s face, watching Mike’s expression shift from brain melted pleasure to wincing pain when he tries to hold his orgasm back, over and over, until he can’t stop himself from fucking into Jay in two hard, sharp snaps of his hips that make Jay clench up tight around him. Mike comes with Jay’s name breaking on his tongue, crashing down onto him. 

“Stay in me,” Jay says, as if Mike was going anywhere. He sits back on his knees to watch Jay touch himself, and moans when he looks down at his still hard cock sliding partway out of Jay's ass. He's pretty sure he's never seen his dick look so red or thick or something, and though he's oversensitive and starting to soften he fucks himself into Jay a little, fascinated by the sight even while the feeling is too much. Jay moans like he likes that and moves his hand faster on his dick. "We almost never do this," he says, gasping this out when Mike meets his eyes. 

"This?"

"You, mhmm-- Watch, watching me-- Oh fuck I'm gonna come, _Mike_ \--"

He spills onto his belly while Mike watches, so in awe for the sight that he only cringes a little when Jay clenches up tight around his spent cock while he unloads. He doesn't even pull out after Jay's done, just leans down to kiss Jay and lets him roll both of them onto their sides, Jay's leg hooking around Mike’s waist to keep him in place. 

Mike is still trying to catch his breath, soaked in sweat, and he can barely remember where the fuck he is when Jay kisses his hair and hums against the top of his head like he’s so impressed, or happy, or something. All Mike knows for a while is that Jay is with him and doesn’t want to let him go. Jay has both arms wrapped around Mike’s neck, his face pressed to Mike’s forehead. Mike could fall asleep like this, and for at least a few seconds he does, still inside Jay.

He wakes up when he feels Jay easing off his dick, letting the mess that spills out of him pool onto the sheets. Jay shifts Mike away from it, and Mike feels weightless, trusting Jay to relocate him and not even opening his eyes. He curls up on his side, exhausted, and misses the sweltering heat of Jay’s skin when he moves away. 

“Where you goin’?” Mike asks, eyes closed and voice thick with the sleep that’s dragging him down fast. He hasn’t known anything resembling rest since his fight with Jay.

“Just texting you,” Jay says, reaching over to scratch at Mike’s scalp while still doing something with his phone. “There,” he says, and the phone clatters onto the bedside table again. Jay curls up around Mike’s back, slipping his arm under Mike’s and tucking it across his chest, holding him tight. “I just told you I love you,” he says. 

“Oh good,” Mike says, and then he falls asleep.

Mike wakes up alone in the dark, on a cold, bare floor. The good smell of the bed he shared with Jay is gone, replaced by the choking scent of something damp and evil, and the window that looked over the bed, which has disappeared along with all the rest of the furniture in the room, along with Jay, is boarded up. 

“Jay?” Mike says, groping for him. There’s nothing but what feels like a dirty old tarp and some loose screws on the floor beside him. Mike’s breath catches and he feels his way down over his chest. He’s dressed, somehow, wearing the clothes he had on when he was at Rich’s house, the ones he wore on his journey to Milwaukee to find Jay. He even has his shoes on, laces tied. 

When he stands on shaky legs, the floor creaks menacingly under his weight. The room he’s in has the same dimensions as the one he fell asleep in, but it’s obvious that no one has lived here for years. It’s abandoned, lifeless, reeking of decay. 

Has he gone further into the future? Did Rich fuck up the spell? Where is Jay?

He makes his way down to the first floor of the house, moving carefully down the staircase though it seems more structurally sound than the second floor, covered in moldy carpet that’s at least one source of the awful smell in this place. Mike remembers Jay mentioning that they bought the house cheap and fixed it up. Does that mean he’s back in 2002? He still has the buttery flavor of those Eggos that Jay served him on his tongue, and the bitter taste of Jay’s come overlaying it. His dried sweat still smells like sex, and something deeper that lingers on his skin smells like Jay. He moves toward the boarded up fireplace, looking for those pictures over the mantle, though he knows they won’t be there. Even the mantle itself isn’t there.

He’s blinking tears out of his eyes by the time he makes his way outside. There’s no for sale sign in the empty house’s front yard, just tall weeds and some scattered fast food garbage that looks like it’s been there for a while. Mike makes it to the street and turns back to stare up at the house, panting his panicked breath. He’s still in Milwaukee. He knows that much: this is the same house Jay brought him to at some point in the past or future, or in Mike’s heartbroken psychotic break of a hallucination, maybe. 

Something in him knows it was real. Knowing this doesn’t make the thought of his next destination any easier. It’s late, the streets empty, and he blew the last of his cash on that bus ticket and mask. He has no phone, not even change for a pay phone, if he could find one. But he knows where he is, close to that warehouse district where he and Jay used to shoot movies and where they eventually open a wedding videography shop, maybe. He stumbles through the night with his arms crossed over his chest. It’s colder at night than he would have expected after such a warm day, but maybe that day was never connected to this night at all, the day he fucked Jay for the first time now waiting somewhere in the far flung future.

He navigates his way to the warehouse district after only a few wrong turns and a little backtracking, and once he’s there he knows how to get to the only safe haven available, though it might be the opposite of that. He has to try, and he doesn’t want to go anywhere else anyway, even if he just gets a door slammed in his face. 

Even the sight of Jay’s apartment building makes his knees shake as he stands staring up at it, the rage he felt when they parted returning and making his hands curl into fists at his sides. But he’s infused with other feelings, too, after whatever the fuck just happened to him. His lips are fat from kissing Jay. He’s sure of it. He didn’t just get drunk at the Palomino and wander into an abandoned house where he dreamed up a future that isn’t real. 

He tells himself this over and over on the long, slow journey up the stairs to Jay’s attic apartment. 

There’s music and voices on the other side of the door when Mike stands outside, already fucking crying. It’s mostly in his chest, and burning at the corners of his eyes, not full on sobbing yet. Jay is having some kind of party in there, or his roommates are. Maybe they’re all celebrating the departure of Mike from these premises forever. Shows how much they know. Mike knocks hard, like he’s angry, like he came here looking for a fight. 

He’s really looking for something very different, and when Jay pulls the door open he must see it on Mike’s face, beyond the veneer of stony silence, because after an annoyed quirk of his lips Jay’s eyes soften and he looks scared, not of Mike but for him. 

“What do you want?” Jay asks, also making an obvious effort to remain stoic. 

Mike tries to speak, but his voice chokes away. Jay looks so different from the one Mike fell asleep beside. He even seems shorter. There’s a group of people in the living room behind him, the roommate Jay doesn’t like and some randoms, a few of whom Mike recognizes. None of them seem to care about the confrontation at the door, busy playing what looks like beer pong. Mike refocuses on Jay and sees that he’s swaying in place a little, his eyes swimming as he stares up at Mike. 

“You’re drunk?” Mike says, finding his voice to express this in shock. Jay never drinks, at all. He’s ‘straight edge,’ a stance that Mike has made about a thousand obvious jokes about. 

“What do you care?” Jay asks. He’s holding onto the door frame with one hand, looking a little green and queasy, maybe just for the sight of Mike. “Are you crying?”

“No.” 

Mike just stands there, waiting to know what to do and trying to not more obviously be crying. His shifts his gaze to the spot on Jay’s throat where he most liked to be kissed. Thinking about this pushes a half sob out, and he’s pretty sure some spit from it lands on Jay’s face.

“Mike,” Jay says, sighing, and then he’s grabbing Mike’s arm, pulling him into the apartment. 

Mike’s eyes blur over on the way to Jay’s bedroom, but once they’re shut inside together he’s blinked them clear. He looks around at Jay’s familiar environs, where they’ve sat talking for hours multiple times. There are balled up tissues on the bedside table, alongside a half empty bottle of rum. 

“I stole that from their party,” Jay says, slurring, when Mike picks up the rum. “I hate them. They’re so loud. I hate everybody. Especially you.”

“Uh-huh,” Mike says. He thunks the bottle down and thinks of what Jay said to him before he fell asleep, that he was telling some other, luckier Mike that he loves him. 

“What do you want?” Jay asks again, his voice cracking a little this time. “How’d you even get here?”

“I walked.”

“From Chicago?”

“No.”

Mike already can’t believe he thought this would be a good idea. He sits down on the floor with his back to Jay’s bed and grabs the rum bottle, holding it but not drinking from it. Jay will have to drag him out of here by the arms, or call the police. If Mike has any say in it, he can’t not be with Jay right now, even if they bitterly hate each other for the time being. 

“Look,” Jay says, standing over him. “I guess. I went a little too far, with some of the things I said--”

“It’s fine,” Mike says, though it isn’t and he sure as hell did. “I know I drive you crazy.”

“You-- What? No, you don’t.” Jay says this like he’s insulted by the suggestion that Mike could drive him anywhere, let alone crazy.

Mike rolls his eyes and takes a swig of rum. He just wants to sleep on Jay’s bedroom floor, with Jay up in the bed. He just wants to never be apart, even if it kills him. 

“I wasn’t making fun of you,” Mike says, staring up at Jay with pleading eyes, letting him glimpse the truth that’s lurking there. “I’m the fuckup. Not you. And I could run away but it wouldn’t do any good.”

He decides he’s humiliated himself enough and puts the cap back on the rum before rolling under Jay’s bed, where he has the company of some old board games, a box full of what is almost certainly porn, and more crumpled tissues.

“Mike?” Jay says, getting down on his knees to peer under the bed.

“Yes?”

“Why are you under my bed?”

“I don’t know. Just leave me here to die.”

Jay sighs. When Mike works up the nerve to look over at him, Jay is lying on his back beside the bed, sort of trapping Mike underneath it. He's wincing up at the ceiling, his hands resting over his stomach. He’s so little, Mike thinks. Mike should leave him alone, only he knows now, and knew before, that Jay doesn’t really want him to.

“I don’t feel good,” Jay says. He reaches up over his head and blindly knocks the rum bottle over. Mike screwed the cap on tight, so it doesn’t spill, just sloshes. Jay makes a pained sound, like even the sloshing noise hurts him. “Why’d I drink that?” he asks, turning to look at Mike. 

“I think ‘cause you’re sad.”

“Fuck you. So what.”

Jay rolls onto his side with a grunt, toward Mike, tucking his hands under his cheek. He avoids Mike’s eyes but curls his knees in close to the edge of the bed. 

Mike reaches for him. It should be so easy. But Jay flinches when he looks up and sees Mike’s hand sliding toward him, emerging from beneath the bed like a monster’s paw. Mike pulls his hand back. 

He can wait. As long as Jay needs him to. That’s the lesson. 

Jay eyes are hazy from the rum, and also unafraid, locking on Mike’s. Out in the living room, glass breaks and the group cheers, laughs. 

“You were right about the movie,” Mike says. “That scene. It’s wrong, dumb. I was indulging myself.” 

Jay makes a face. Then he smiles, a little, and puts his hand over the spot on the floor where Mike’s was before he pulled it back. 

“My stomach hurts,” Jay says, in a tiny voice that makes Mike ache all over with wanting to hold him. 

“I’ll be here if you get sick,” Mike says. 

“To do what?”

“Laugh.”

Jay’s eyes do a twinkle thing, his nose scrunches up, and then he’s grinning, laughing, sort of convulsing with it against the floor. 

Mike smiles back at him, though he’s in a lot of pain, too. He doesn’t want to think about all the years ahead of waiting this out, not even knowing how many it will be. He thinks about being somewhere in Chicago in the distant future and getting a text from Jay that says _I love you_. He wouldn’t put it past Jay to hold out till then to say so, but at least by then Mike will know it anyway. 

Eventually, Jay barfs up most of the rum he drank, with Mike sitting beside him on the bathroom floor for moral support while the party goes on outside. Mike stays the night, on the floor, in Jay’s old sleeping bag, which kind of smells like his jizz. Mike buries his face in it and sleeps in fits and starts, listening to Jay toss and turn up in the bed. They’ve shared a room before, even a bed, with pillows piled between them to keep up the pretense that they would never want to reach for each other in the middle of the night and find nothing there to stop them. 

They sleep late and walk to Culver’s at noon. Jay mostly watches Mike eat, looking miserable and sipping water through a straw from a paper cup. Mike doesn’t say much, out of respect for Jay’s hangover, and because he has so much he wants to say that won’t make sense to Jay yet. He holds it in and passes Jay french fries at intervals, thrilling when their fingers brush together. It’s enough for now.

“This is fucked up,” Mike says, remembering what Jay said about their wedding vows. “And I love how fucked up it is.” 

He’s exaggerating, a little. He’ll learn to love it, if he can, until he gets what he really wants. At least it’s a way of saying he loves Jay, for now. Jay looks confused, then he smiles a little, chewing up the french fry Mike just gave him. 

“I’m sorry I lost my shit,” Jay says, making his face serious again. “You just. Mike--”

“I know, I know, I know. I’m sorry, too.” 

They stare at each other for a while, until Mike feels like he can’t look away. Maybe Jay feels it, too. 

I’m gonna take such good care of you, Mike thinks, willing Jay to read it in his eyes. As soon as you let me. And before then, too. 

“You’re giving me this, like, psycho killer stare,” Jay says, flushed across his cheeks.

“Get used to it,” Mike says.

Jay smiles, then snickers. He puts his hands over his face and moans, peeking at Mike from between his spread fingers.

“Oww,” Jay says, leaning over onto the table. 

“Your head?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mike gets the feeling he’s actually talking about something else, but he lets it slide. He loves Jay enough to surround him like bubble wrap until he’s ready to handle the harder stuff. Jay lifts his head with a sigh and pushes his hands across the table, toward Mike, keeping his palms flat. Mike looks at Jay’s left ring finger and thumbs at his own, empty for now but not forever. He’s got some kind of proof, and he’s going to cling to it.

When he confronts Rich a few days later about the whole having mystical powers and sending him back through time with beer thing, Rich just laughs and tells him to shut up.

“You got drunk and disappeared,” Rich says. “I guess you somehow made your way to Milwaukee while plastered. Who’s surprised? Not me!”

“I’m onto you,” Mike says, his eyes narrowed and his finger pointed in Rich’s face. 

“Fine, Mike, you’re onto me. Got it, noted.”

Rich doesn’t do any further magic, as far as Mike can tell. The whole thing becomes a bit blurry in Mike’s memory, until all he knows is that he belongs to Jay for good and there’s no getting around it. 

He’s almost never mad about this, even when he tries to be. Jay is always at his side in some way or another, and then he’s even closer, closer, until he’s wiping tears from his eyes with Mike’s cock still buried inside him, saying he’s not crying, he’s not, even though Mike knows he is, because he can feel it and see it and because Jay told him this would happen, once.  


*

Jay woke up alone, too, in his bed. The Mike from the past was gone. Even his clothes had disappeared. Jay had to check his phone and read through his bizarre text messages with Mike to make sure he wasn’t going crazy, after he’d roamed the whole house and yard calling Mike’s name, looking for the young one he’d fallen asleep holding. 

Then he called his Mike on the phone, needing to hear his voice. 

“He’s gone,” Jay said, hating that he sounded shaken up. They’d been married for almost three years and had been inseparable since he couldn’t even remember when, but he still didn’t like it when Mike caught him having an emotion. “I think?”

“Yeah,” Mike said, gently. He sounded like he’d been asleep when Jay called; it was four o’clock in the morning. “I made it home okay, though. Don’t worry.” 

“I’m not-- Worried, I’m fucking-- Dizzy, or something, from this! Come home, okay?”

“I will--”

“Like, now? Please?”

Mike said he would. Jay paced around the house, waiting for him to arrive, his chest sort of jittering in a way that wasn’t crying, exactly, but something in that neighborhood. He felt robbed, weird, dragged over rocks, but also lucky in some strange way, because what if that interlude with Mike-from-the-past was why they stayed together? How could he know it wasn’t? And what the fuck would the wreck of his life be like without Mike? He didn’t want to think about it. Everyone they knew expected them to be devastated by the downturn in business, but they’d spent most of the year just bumming around the house together doing small projects and making weird videos for their own amusement, and it had honestly been kind of heavenly, despite all the uncertainty and financial setbacks and everything. Jay always felt okay if Mike was with him. He needed Mike to be back and fix things just by existing, and he kept checking his phone, afraid he’d find some awful message saying there had been an accident while Mike raced home to him. 

The sun was just starting to come up when Jay heard Rich’s car out front. He didn’t go out to greet them, not in the mood for Rich after that stunt he just pulled, even if it did save the entire world, from Jay’s perspective. Jay waited in the foyer, hands balled into fists, listening to the sound of Mike’s heavy footsteps on the front porch. When Mike came through the door Jay had to hold back from launching himself at him like a refugee from their fucked up past, and then he thought: why bother? He was that, technically, and Mike just grinned when Jay ran to him and climbed him like a tree, clinging. 

“Oh my god,” Jay said, burying his face against Mike’s throat so he could properly inhale the comforting scent of him. “That was. Mike! You _remembered_ that?” He reared back to show Mike his betrayed expression. “All this time, you knew--?”

“Why do you think I was always trying to kiss you?” 

“You were trying that before Rich sent you back through time! That’s the whole reason we screamed at each other and set this shit in motion!”

“Well. Yeah. What’d you want me to do, tell you I saw a vision of our future? How well would that have gone, when even the usual stuff wasn’t working?”

Jay had to concede this. He leaned up onto his toes to give Mike a welcome home kiss, noticing now how much better he was at this than he’d been when he was younger. Not that Mike was particularly young when Jay finally kissed him. He’d still improved over the years. 

“God, you know-- That hurt,” Jay said, staring up at Mike when he was flat on his feet again. Mike was still holding him close, looking sleepy and content, his hands on Jay’s waist. “Waking up without you.”

“I know.” Mike yawned and leaned down to put his forehead on Jay’s shoulder, rubbing his face there in a territory-marking kind of way. “But I don’t think it’ll happen again.” 

Jay clung to him for the rest of the day, just in case. Mike had no complaints. He kept looking over at Jay like he always had, like he knew everything. Jay had new context for this, and maybe a new reason to be annoyed by it, but he just kissed Mike every time he caught that look in his eyes. 

“So this is why you didn’t give up on me,” Jay said when they were in bed together that night, post-fuck, still clinging.

“Nope,” Mike said. 

“Nope?”

“I wouldn’t have, anyway. Rich doubts my commitment to you. That’s fine. I would have been your hapless servant in any universe.”

“Oh, right, I’m sure.”

“Ask Rich sometime.”

“Did you ask him?”

“No comment.”

“Mike, what the fuck!”

Jay laughed and rolled over, pretending to be irritated. He pressed his grin into his pillow when Mike spooned up behind him. Maybe Mike had a long conversation about Rich about all their alternate universes, and maybe Jay would care enough to really grill him about it someday. In the meantime he was tired, and comfortable, and had everything he needed to know within reach. 

*

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of theme songs for this one, including this cheesy (*the songs are always cheesy but I'm compelled to continue to warn) song that inspired the title:
> 
> [No Hard Feelings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHvVFpMRY0o)
> 
> [and this Pinegrove song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhblTs9Z0RE)
> 
> [and this !??!?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlYkGEQHpQU)


End file.
